“Nothing obviously broken,” the man grunted. “Apart from his nose, of course. I wouldn’t be surprised if several of his ribs are cracked. He may have internal injuries but I can’t tell just by looking. You carry on cleaning him up and I’ll fetch something to stitch up those gashes. Try and get him to drink a little water, too.”
The man rattled the iron grill.
“Let me out of here!”
The woman started sobbing the instant they were alone.
“You bastard!” She gasped half-heartedly. Warm salty tears dropped on his face. “You used me… You bastard…”
There was clinking of metal on rock and a canteen was being held to the man’s lips.
“Drink this,” the woman ordered him in a small, defeated voice.
Brackish water slurped into the man’s parched mouth and he swallowed greedily. The canteen was snatched away.
“You can have more in a minute if that doesn’t make you sick.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t want your thanks!” She snapped. “For anything!”
“I am Colonel Arkady Pavlovich Rykov of the First Directorate of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. At the time of the October War I was Second Secretary at my country’s embassy in Ankara.” It hurt to speak so he rested a while until the pain subsided. “In the jargon of the Central Intelligence Agency,” his English was suddenly heavily accented because he didn’t have the energy or the inclination to project the pastiche of the public school educated British naval officer he’d been twenty-four hours ago, “I was the KGB’s head of station in Turkey. I had been working for the Americans for over two years and my own people were watching me. Somebody in Washington betrayed me, I think. The Committee for State Security has many assets embedded in America…”
“Why are you telling me this?” Clara Pullman asked hoarsely.
“I want to go to England one last time,” he muttered feeling himself being dragged into the arms of sleep, “before it is too late…”
The next time Arkady Rykov regained consciousness he was being carried on a stretcher down a gentle gradient. It was pitch black and the hobnailed boots of the men bearing the litter rang dully on the road beneath their feet. It was like a waking dream; the darkness was momentarily turned to daylight by huge flash high in the heavens. Opening his eyes again the bright light had gone and in its place a glowing falling star drifted down across Algeciras Bay.
“Fucking Dagoes!” A man nearby growled.
The man on the stretcher lapsed again in unconsciousness.
Awakening anew in a white-washed cell, his broken nose wrinkled as it was assailed by the antiseptic stench of his surroundings. Through his one partially opened eye he focused on the woman in the chair beside his low cot. Clara was dozing, her head lolling a little. Her hair was awry and she was dressed in what looked like the sort of blue dungarees worn by engine room artificers the world over.
“Ah, we’re back in the world of the living!”
Clara Pullman awoke with a start and stared at the third person in the small, windowless room in the bunker somewhere beneath the Rock of Gibraltar. Major Denzil Williams who’d introduced himself to her — only a few hours ago but it seemed like days — as being the ‘Head of SIS in these parts’ had been apologetic, in a cursory way, about the ‘drama’ of the arrest of her ‘partner in crime’. After she’d stopped crying and he’d promised to ensure that her ‘partner in crime’ received medical attention, she’d answered his questions. She’d held nothing back, there seemed no point. She was a little surprised he didn’t ask her more questions; it was as if he knew her whole life story, and everywhere that she’d been with the man he’d called ‘Comrade Rykov’.
“Sorry about the rough stuff,” the MI6 man said. “I told the chaps you were a dangerous fellow and they took me a little too much at my word.”
Arkady Rykov tried to bring the short fat man’s face into focus.
“You have put on weight, Denzil…”
“These days it pays to feast when food is plentiful ahead of the coming famine. But I didn’t come here to talk about me. There we were all set up to fall on you like a ton of bricks at Brize Norton! What happened in Malta, did you baulk at the jump, old man?”
“The people at Luqa asked too many questions,” Clara snapped irritably.
“Ah. Comrade Rykov has obviously passed a little of his tradecraft on to you, dear lady.”
“Don’t you dare ‘dear lady’ me, you little prick!” The woman spat angrily. “We were trying to get to England to warn you!”
“Oh, yes.” Denzil Williams shrugged, unimpressed. “About the darkness descending upon the Empire from the east. Red Dawn indeed! It all sounds rather fanciful to me.” He sniffed derisively. “Still, you’ll be glad to hear that my elders and betters back in the old country want to have a chinwag with you about it all before they put you up a against a wall and shoot you. I haven’t worked out how I get you from here to there yet but I’m working on it. In the meantime I’ll leave you two lovebirds together.”
Arkady Rykov grimaced his thanks as the woman pulled the coarse woollen blanket up to his chin as soon as they were alone. She huffed scornfully and sat on the cell’s single rickety wooden chair. The man cautiously surveyed his surroundings.
“I feel such a fool!” Clara Pullman exclaimed lowly.
“Betrayal becomes a habit in my career,” Arkady Rykov stated.
“I thought you loved me,” she replied sadly.
“I do,” he protested, raising himself onto an unsteady elbow. “Ever since Beirut. After Beirut I resolved never to put you at such risk again.”
“Oh.” The woman got to her feet and began to pace. Two steps one way, three shorter steps another and then back again. “But everything was a lie? Everything we’ve been through the last year was a lie?”
Pain shot through with red hot splinters lanced across Arkady Rykov’s chest as he forced himself to sit up on the cot. His head swam as he fought to catch his breath. He thought about attempting to get to his feet; knew it would be a bad mistake.
“My name is Arkady,” he groaned. “You have no idea how much I ached to hear my name spoken by your lips, Clara. No idea…”
“I don’t even know you!”
“That is not true. Nobody knows me as you know me.”
Clara Pullman brushed this aside.
“I don’t know you!”
The man sighed raggedly. “You don’t know that I was born in Kiev in 1921. You don’t know that I became a member of the Party when I was sixteen, or that I was a Commissar executing soldiers who failed to stand and fight the Fascists before Moscow when I was twenty years old. You don’t know that I was recruited by the NKVD — the Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del — after I returned from Stalingrad with Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, to whom I had become a protégé during the battle. It was Nikita Sergeyevich who ordered me to learn to speak English ‘as the English speak it’, and thus I became an interpreter for Iosif Vissarionovich whom you know in the West as Stalin at Yalta and later at Potsdam…” His voice grew so hoarse he could hardly form a new word.
The woman held out a canteen and he drank deeply.
She said nothing, returning to her chair, watching and listening with a peculiarly feline intensity.
Presently, he resumed his story.
“At Yalta and Potsdam I was ordered to fraternise — in small ways — with the British and the American interpreters, and given, by Iosif Vissarionovich himself, permission to ‘smoke cigarettes with the capitalists’. He wanted to know what the British and the Americans really understood of our great motherland. Which was very little but Iosif Vissarionovich and his pet Lavrentiy Beria, who was soon to become my master, trusted nothing the Generals of the NKVD told them. For men like them it is always easier to believe no one than to trouble oneself with having to decide in whom one should place one’s trust.”